By maintaining the tension between artists’ imaginative approaches to technology in the Soviet Union (Meyerhold’s Biomechanics), film directors’ use of science such as physiology (Eisenstein’s Expressive Movement), and scientists’ own theorization of art history (Lev Vygotsky’s The Psychology of Art), this workshop aims at unpacking the historical and political forces behind Soviet film theory, film practice, and art history in relation to science and technology. While examining the juncture between art, science, and technology in post-Revolutionary Russia, with a focus on the avant-garde period until the death of Joseph Stalin, cinema is thus considered as a device beyond its medium of film (Francois Albera, Maria Tortajada: Cinema Beyond Film) and the medium-specificity of the arts is called into question.Continuer la lecture de Appel à communication : « Intersections of Art, Science and Technology in Soviet Film and Culture » (jusqu’au 15 juin 2016)

Rudolf von Eitelberger (1817–1885) A Conference on the Occasion of his Two-Hundredth Birthday (Vienna, 27–29 April 2017) Rudolf von Eitelberger stands at the inception of many institutions and initiatives: he held the first professorship of art history at the University of Vienna (1852); he was the driving force and founding director of the first museum of applied arts outside England (1863), and of the affiliated school of applied art (1867); he inaugurated the Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (1871) and, lastly, he was closely associated with early conservation efforts in the Danube Monarchy (Central-Commission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale). It would be safe to say that Eitelberger occupied a pivotal position at the confluence of art history, the applied arts and cultural policy in Ringstrasse Vienna, and that the impact of his ideas was felt well beyond the Austrian capital. Continuer la lecture de Appel à communication : « Rudolf von Eitelberger (1817–1885) » (jusqu’au 19 juin 2016)

Commonly held ideas about the Eighties picture a decade of unrepentant art boom, ideological disengagement, and postmodern drift toward an alleged « end of history. » A closer look at Europe, however, suggests otherwise. The fall of the dictatorships in Southern Europe, the ending of the cold war and subsequent changes in Central and Eastern Europe dramatically reconfigured the geography of the continent. New relationships with former colonies and the rise of neo-liberalism enduringly changed its political climate, while intensified migrations complicated the perception of national identities and cultures. Europe therefore became a space of encounters with challenged borders, sharing the hopes of reunification and freedom, and the evils of neo-fascist activism or AIDS epidemic. The arts were by no mean absent from these disruptions. Art scenes which had been long constrained and largely withheld from view from the West evolved from clandestinity to openness, and new networks were built or re-activated. Circulations to or within the continent also fostered new exchanges, and allowed for fruitful and sometimes conflictual collisions between artistic traditions, trainings and canons. With the historical distance, increasingly accessible archives and artworks, as well as a wider range of art historical methods, it is now possible to address this period in new critical terms. It is the contention of this session that recovering the historical depth of the European Eighties is a necessary step to a better understanding of the globalization that shapes today’s art world as well as the challenges that western democracies are currently facing, esp. extreme far-right identity politics, migrant crisis, and doubts on the future of the UE.

The development of critical feminist discourses since the 1960s has elucidated ways in which social, political and economic structures have impacted on the production and display of artwork. Gradually, the construction of gender in collecting, curating, exhibiting and producing art began to be understood as a reflection of wider social and cultural narratives, extending beyond gendered identities of individual artists or curators. In collaboration with Loughborough University, this year’s annual two-day AAH Student Summer Symposium will investigate current critical and art-historical approaches that develop theories, methodologies and debates to analyse the making, display and collection of art in light of concepts of gender. Continuer la lecture de Appel à communication : « Gender in Art: Production, Collection, Display » (jusqu’au 23 mars 2016)

Appel à communication : « Working on Things: On the Social, Political, and Economic History of Collected Objects »

Berlin, 21-22 novembre 2016

Working on Things: On the Social, Political, and Economic History of Collected Objects Organized as part of the project “Dinosaurs in Berlin. Brachiosaurus brancai as an Icon of Politics, Science and Popular Culture”, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, in cooperation with the base project “Mobile Objects” as part of the German Research Foundation’s cluster of excellence “Image Knowledge Gestaltung: An Interdisciplinary Laboratory”. “Art is beautiful, but it’s a lot of work.” Karl Valentin’s aphorism can be applied to all kinds of collected objects, regardless of whether they belong to the fields of art history, natural history, ethnography, archaeology, or history. Various kinds of work have to be invested in objects before they become worthy of collection, before they can be researched, preserved, and exhibited. Work on the dinosaur skeleton of Brachiosaurus brancai in Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde, for example, extended far beyond the decades of the fossil’s preparation in the Museum. This object’s history also includes the colonial forced labour on cotton plantations in German East Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, that produced the packing material necessary for transporting the findings to Europe. Such figurations of work across time and space form the focus of the conference “Working on Things”. The conference thus builds upon studies in the history of science and the sociology of knowledge that have shifted the attention from the contents of knowledge to its practices. Science as a practice has been considered in terms of the “fabrication” or creation of facts and its functioning as a major enterprise has come to the fore in recent studies. The conference will take the potential of this practical and material turn seriously yet at the same time proposes to expand it. By analysing the work that is invested in objects of knowledge, the very concepts of practice and of object can be opened into broader social, cultural, juridical, political, and economic dimensions. Practices as work are thus understood as technical, administrative, artisanal, artistic, classifying, or maintenance activities, which are strongly defined by economics and which in turn produce economies of their own. They are shaped by political and social contexts, cultural conventions, hierarchies, and regulations, and should therefore be questioned with regard to their function in creating values, and social in/equalities. The goal of the conference is to combine an object-focused history of knowledge with approaches in social and political history that move beyond classical narratives of social history or the history of collections and institutions. The conference therefore intends to open a discussion about collected objects from the fields of natural history, art history, ethnography, archaeology, and history as focal points for often globally distributed and historically specific work settings from the mid-nineteenth century onwards: which kinds of materials and immaterial labour had to be invested in order to acquire or produce a given object, in order to transport it, examine it, exhibit it, or valuate it? What existing knowledge, and which social, political, and legal conditions characterized this work? How was the work remunerated and categorized? What types of materials, tools or techniques were used? Who were the actors? What types of complications occured in object-related work settings? The conference encourages examinations of work settings relating to collection items both within and beyond institutions in order to better understand their historical peculiarities. Furthermore, it aims at describing global and local interdependencies of very different kinds of work on objects. Our leading questions are:

The “Rhodes Must Fall” and “Fees Must Fall” campaigns which arose in South Africa in the course of 2015, while focused on transformative agendas in a broad sense, also emphasised how various inheritances from the West have played a fundamental role in shaping universities – not only in terms of their curricula but also their institutional cultures more generally. Occurring in a context where the humanities are under threat and where neoliberal forces may upset what we understand as fundamental to the academic project, these recent calls for critical engagement with institutional histories and practices suggest that reconsideration of disciplinary knowledges and understandings have become increasingly urgent.

We are seeking approximately seven papers for a proposal for the 2018 special edition of Ars Orientalis. Our proposed edition will address, over a vast chronological and geographical spectrum, the representation and visualization of body parts in the material cultures of Asia, and will investigate their role in the formation of symbols, relics, and objects of ritual in architecture, painting, sculpture, film, print media, manuscripts, photography, arms and armor, and fashion.

In 2016, the Dutch Association of Aesthetics celebrates the 20th anniversary of the decision to found it, which was made in Antwerp. On this special occasion, the annual conference will take place in Antwerp again, drawing attention to the founding question « What is Aesthetics? » Today, any inquiry into the nature of the discipline of aesthetics is inevitably confronted with two key problems. On the one hand, it must address those voices that defend, with renewed vigour, an empirical take on aesthetics. These empirical currents explicitly reiterate Baumgarten’s definition of aesthetics as the science of perception. As such, they seem to defy other views that emphasize the transcendental, historical and/or normative conditions of aesthetics. Ensuing questions concern, amongst others, the role of such notions as the beautiful and the sublime, the proper place of history and tradition in aesthetics, as well as the epistemological status of aesthetics.

Art History for Artists (Berlin, 8-9 Jul 2016) Berlin, TU, July 8 – 09, 2016 Deadline: Mar 1, 2016 Art history for artists: interactions between scholarly discourse and artistic practice in the 19th century International Conference TU Berlin, July 8-9, 2016 Call for Papers Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2016 The conference seeks to examine the shaping of art history as a discipline during the 19th century in relation to artistic training and exchanges between artists and scholars. The development of art history has been associated with an array of socio-political and economic factors such as the formation of a bourgeois public, the politics of national identity and state legitimacy or the needs of an expanding art market. This conference aspires to explore yet another, less studied dimension: the extent to which the historical study of art was also rooted in an intention to inform contemporary artistic production. The scholarship produced by the first generations of art historians in this period was intertwined with their interest in the art of their time, its quality and future development. Continuer la lecture de Appel à communication : « Art History for Artists » (jusqu’au 1er mars 2016)